Beyond the blame game: The real economics driving Nigeria’s price crisis – Businessday NG

When you walk into the market today, you don’t need a World Bank report to know something is fundamentally wrong. Salaries are flat, rents are rising, food is almost a luxury, and yes, the price of a bag of cement feels like punishment.

So when a recent piece described what is happening as “broad-day robbery” and “corporate greed”, I understood the mood. Many Nigerians genuinely feel betrayed – not just by the government, but by companies whose profits seem to be rising even as people are tightening their belts.

But as someone who has sat on both sides of the table, looking at family budgets and looking at corporate balance sheets, I also know that the story is more complicated than a simple “greed” headline.

We owe it to ourselves, and to the conversation, to tell the full story.

After the naira float: profits today, but remember the heavy losses yesterday.

We all remember what happened immediately after the naira was floated in 2023. The currency moved from about ₦460 to the dollar to well over ₦1,400–₦1,500 within a short period.

That single policy shift did not just hit households; it tore through corporate balance sheets.

Many listed Nigerian entities, especially in consumer goods, cement, telecoms and breweries, reported enormous foreign exchange losses running into hundreds of billions of naira in 2023 and 2024. In more than a few cases, local entities could not service dollar obligations and had to renegotiate, restructure or even convert parts of those debts into equity just to stay alive.

So yes, some companies are now posting “beautiful” profit numbers as FX stabilises a bit and previous translation losses are fading. But what many people see as a sudden harvest is, in reality, a partial recovery from very deep holes that were dug during the FX shock.

If we only compare today’s margins with last year’s without remembering those earlier write-offs and the continuing FX risks on dollar-denominated loans, we will miss the full picture.

Cement as a case study: not just “greed”, but energy, FX and survival

Let’s take the favourite punching bag: cement.

It’s easy to point at cement prices and shout “opportunistic pricing”. But cement is one of the most energy-intensive products you can manufacture. Energy – kiln fuel and power – can account for 50–60 percent of cement production cost.

A kiln doesn’t sleep. It runs 24 hours a day. In an ideal environment, that power comes from a stable national grid at predictable tariffs. In Nigeria, we don’t have that luxury. Cement plants rely heavily on captive power – mainly gas – to keep the kilns running.

Here’s the part that many people don’t realise:

Gas, even though produced in Nigeria, is largely priced in dollars. The plants run on gas; the bills are in dollars. So when the naira moves from ₦460/$ to over ₦1,400/$, the effective cost of that gas in naira can jump threefold or more, before you even talk about other inputs.

Now imagine running a business where:

– Your power (a major cost input) is effectively tied to the dollar.

– Your main machines, spare parts and technical services are imported and paid for in forex.

– Your loans for those machines are in dollars.

– But you must sell your final product locally in naira.

What happens when the exchange rate suddenly jumps three times, then keeps fluctuating? If you keep your prices “socially friendly” while your costs explode in naira terms, you don’t become a hero – you simply go under. That is the FX mismatch that is quietly sitting behind a lot of the price increases we are seeing today.

So when people ask, “Why has cement gone from X to Y when inflation has fallen? ”, they are mixing two very different conversations. Headline inflation easing does not automatically mean FX-linked costs, energy tariffs and imported spares have gone back to 2021 levels. They haven’t.

Is there room to question and challenge cement pricing? Absolutely. But to say it is simply “broad-day robbery” without engaging these cost realities is, in my view, too simplistic.

The roadside food seller is “repricing” too.

Another honest point: cement is not more “opportunistic” than many other things we see every day.

Talk to the woman who sells cooked food by the roadside. Her rent has gone up. Transport for rice, beans and tomatoes has gone up. Kerosene or gas has gone up. She does exactly what the cement company does: she adjusts her price so she doesn’t disappear.

The baker does the same with bread. The tailor, the barber, the ride-hailing driver – everybody is repricing to survive in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) Nigerian marketplace.

Are there cases where people hide behind “dollar” or “inflation” to inflate prices far beyond costs? Yes, there are. But that behaviour is not unique to big corporates; it runs through the entire value chain, formal and informal.

If we are going to have an honest conversation, then we must admit that what we are dealing with is a system-wide response to broken fundamentals – not just the greed of a few large companies.

Where the “greed” argument is valid

This is not a defence of every corporate decision.

There are sectors and specific companies whose margins have expanded far faster than is justified by their cost profiles. Some have become very comfortable passing on all cost increases and then some, with little effort to cut internal waste, improve productivity or share pain.

We have also seen:

– Shrinkflation.

– Frequent price changes that outpace both cost increases and exchange-rate movements.

– Limited investment in new capacity or efficiency, even when profits are strong.

In those cases, the criticism of “opportunistic pricing” is fair. But we must ground that criticism in data and sector-by-sector analysis, not blanket condemnation.

So what do we do? Practical steps, not just outrage

1. Stabilise FX and energy – tackle the root, not just the branches.

2. Demand radical transparency from big corporates.

3. Strengthen competition and cut structural bottlenecks.

4. Build better social protections and income support.

The balance we need

It is easy to reduce our economic pain to a single villain: “corporate greed”. But the real Nigeria is more complex.

Yes, some companies are guilty of weaponising inflation and FX shocks for excessive gain. They should be called out and checked.

At the same time, many firms are simply trying to stay afloat in a brutally difficult operating environment – one where they borrow or buy inputs in dollars, sell in naira, power their factories with self-funded energy, and live with policy swings that can wipe out years of planning overnight.

If we genuinely want a fairer economy, we must learn to hold both truths together:

– Protect consumers from exploitation,

– And protect productive enterprises from policies that quietly push them to the brink.

That is the balance we must insist on – in our journalism, in our boardrooms, and in our politics.

George Enema is a creative entrepreneur and productivity advocate.